Attend 2 meetings of a group to see if it meets your specific wants and needs.

Meet at least 2 people at each event and exchange contact information.

Arrange 2 follow up meetings with the people you met at each event-so it really multiplies with expanding your network from your efforts, initiative and follow up. And don’t limit yourself to only 2 people, it is a starting point.

This is great guidance. People often go to one networking meeting and give up “I went to the Rotary Club and I didn’t get any leads”. That is not networking. Great networkers build relationships. People do business with people they know, like and trust. So if a group seems like it might be a good fit for you after 2 visits, get involved. Volunteer for a committee, bring a few friends to a meeting, ask how you can get involved.

Andrea’s third tip “Arrange 2 follow up meetings” also makes your networking goal easy. All you need to do is meet 2 people worthy of meeting for coffee or lunch and you’re done! It is these more personal meetings where you learn about the person, their passions, and their business needs. Now you can really help them, and networking is about doing something for the other person first, the karmic benefits will come to you in time.

In the age of interactive marketing we can get exact information about how our programs are working, some of the things we covered in these slides include:
- What to look at in Google Analytics
- How to baseline your competitor’s activities
- Social Media Measurement
- Exit Surveys
- Facebook Insights, YouTube Insights
- Read the minds of your customers
- Free and Paid Tools

I participated in a ‘Rock-Star’ YouTube and Video Marketing Panel for the Boca Raton Chamber of Commerce, with JB Glossinger, Share Ross and Jennifer Seremetis. Below are some of my Key Learnings and the slides from the event, a video of the presentation will be uploaded as well.

At the end of the video offer a Free eBook to build your opt-in email list. Every time you relase a video send an eMail

Use YouTube Annotations to layer text, links, and hotspots over your video. They add information, interactivity and engagement.

Building your community is key – we have 2,000 people paying $20 a month

Believe in yourself, be authentic, some people will love you, some will hate you

Testimonials (which you can shoot on Skype) scream ‘Social Proof’

Your first videos will really suck, you will hate seeing yourself on camera. But, you will get better and go from really suck to suck

There are 2 classes of video. On YouTube you can have quickly produced ‘selfies’ shot with a GoPro and Skype interviews. On your website you should have professional video so that when people come there they decide ‘he is the real deal’

Yesterday two people asked me for tips about networking at events and conferences. Ten years ago I had almost no ‘Network’, last year LinkedIn ranked me in their top 1%, so I guess I qualify to share some suggestions for good networking.

1. Go to a meeting or event with a modest goal of making 2 connections who you will have a follow-up meeting with. This means that you don’t have a huge burden or responsibility.
2. Plan to have meaningful conversation with a few people (as opposed to many small meaningless conversations (or worse being the dude who passes out dozens of business cards and looks over everyone’s shoulder for someone more important to hand a card to).
3. Look for people who are on their own and make an easy ice breaker “Wow traffic sure was crazy tonight”. People on their own are often desperate for someone to talk to them, they are normally very uncomfortable speaking to people and they are feeling left out. Also start conversations in coat-check lines, at check-in, at the bar etc. It is easy to start a little something in these settings.
4. The MOST IMPORTANT thing about networking is that it is NOT ABOUT YOU. Great networkers are people who listen, and really care about why the other person is there. Are they looking for a job, business leads, an employee to hire, a date? If you get someone a job (or a date that goes well) they will remember you forever. Ask them questions to make the conversation easy – people love to talk about themselves. Have you been to these events before? Can you believe how much rain we’ve been getting? Have you heard anything about tonight’s speaker? Why did you come here tonight? Do you have anything planned for the weekend/holidays/big game etc. Please tell me about your family. Do you have any special hobbies (my friend Jeff loves this question – he collects peoples ‘passions’, if they love wine he sends them articles about wine auctions and wine tasting events.)
5. Be the person who actually follows up. Dear Steve, you mentioned at the Chamber event that you were looking for clients in the medical field. I spoke to my contact at Metro Hospital and she would be willing to meet with you to discuss your services, her contact info is x,y,z. Dear Karen, it was a pleasure to meet you at ABC Association. As discussed I would like to arrange a quick coffee meet-up to learn a little more about your business. I am confident that a few of my contacts would be valuable for you. I am available after work next Tuesday or Wednesday.
6. Database all of your contacts using Outlook or a similar system. Add a note to each contact about where you met the person and a few interesting personal items or passions. Back up your contacts on your phone. Connect to people on LinkedIn or Facebook (if appropriate).

My top networking reference books are Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi (awesome) and a couple others: Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty: The Only Networking Book You’ll Ever Need by Harvey Mackay (I think I have a copy), One Phone Call Away: Secrets of a Master Networker by Jeffrey W. Meshel

What would a year-end review be without looking at top ten lists? The top social media sites have released the top individuals and actions in their communities.

Facebook's Most talked about person 2013 Pope Francis

According to Facebook, the most ‘talked about’ person on the network was the new Pope Francis, followed by the Royal Baby and Myley Cyrus.

However the Pope doesn’t end the year with anywhere approaching the most Facebook Fans, that honor goes to a much less pious Eminem with 79,680,368 Fans, just head of Shakira who has just over 76 million Fans.

Perhaps the stat we look at the most in the online marketing business is not how many fans a person or a business has, but the engagement level or PTAT. Facebook Fan Pages report the number of fans (or Likes) and the number of People Talking About This, which is primarily comprised of the number of times people like something on the page, comment or share. In the chart below, we find that the Pope has an extremely engaged audience with 12.38% PTAT, followed by Miley Cyrus at 7.29%. It is important to note that PTAT is reported on a weekly basis.

Facebook Fan Page PTAT - People Talking About This

Twitter reported that Lea Michele @msleamichele from the television show Glee’s first public tweet about the death of her boyfriend and costar Cory Monteith garnered the most retweets – peaking at 408,266 shares. This was much lower than the most retweeted tweet of 2012 @BarakObama ‘s tweet “Four More Years” which was retweeted over 784,000 times.

Jerome Hutchinson introduced the entrepreneurship panel at the ICABA Business Forum and said ‘I am looking forward to a Liquidity Event’, the panel has had a couple of them.

Robert Beatty, Dinah Stephenson and Steven Bettinger

The first speaker was Robert Beatty, CEO of Beatty Media.

Robert worked at Miami Herald as Legal Council, President called him in and HR Manager walked in – that’s not good. The Herald had been purchased they wanted him to move to California where they were collapsing all legal departments.

There are many transition points to being an entrepreneur. There is new training for young executives from corporate mindset to entrepreneurial spirit. But there is no way to become and entrepreneur except for becoming an entrepreneur. You can get he concepts, but until you get the P&L and payroll responsibility.

Every week he has a big payroll and the next week a small payroll. Every week he feels that responsibility.

My sales manager has increased sales every year since I hired her, she is ‘my boss’.

I started in the early days of the internet with online education. Next we did online tax preparation. People said it would never work.

Next I bought a distressed Bubble Bath company. Sold it for 99 cents. I was able to acquire brands Baby Magic and Mr. Bubble and sell it for $4.00 and $5.00 at Wal-Mart and Target and sold the business at $250,000,000 revenue.

Next I loaned money to entrepreneurs.

I tell my daughter every day. Tell me what you did and how you failed. I want to instill in them

The value of networking. My father taught me that early on. Speak to everyone – a lot of Starbucks meetings. I’ve flown across the country for a lunch.

Integrity is important. be able to admit when you’re wrong. Even when times are wrong I’ve always told the truth.

I am fanatic about customer service. The first person that answers the phone must say hello my name is, how can I help you today. If we make a mistake, credit them and hope they tell a friend.

I am often asked how you can produce social media content for all the different social media websites? Who has the time?

The simple solution I recommend I call ‘Cascading Content’.

All you have to do is create 1 or 2 new pieces of content each month and ‘cascade it down’ like water from a single source cascades down a waterfall.

Write an article or two every month.

Send it to your list as an eNewsletter. It helps you stay top-of-mind with your customers and prospects. You can use Constant Contact or another email provider to send the emails.

Then post those articles on your website. The website can be a WordPress blog, like www.jayberkowitz.com which is inexpensive to put up and easy for anyone with no computer skills to update and add content.

Then post a short update linking to each article on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. This is ‘copy and paste’ and can be done in about 10 minutes.

There it is – your Easy-as-Pie Social Media strategy. And all you had to do was come up with one or two original ideas each month.